Ten Reasons Why

If it hasn't been obvious I'm on hiatus and probably will stay as such for a while longer. Too many other things to focus on. In fact, I'm thinking about scrapping blogging altogether. I don't get out of it what I used to (primarily because I don't put into it what I used to).

Curious: assuming that I stop blogging, how would people react if I just took down the weblog entirely? E.g. any links people had made to old articles would be broken. Is there some etiquette around this? Is there some way to do it politely? re-directs? 60-day lead time? What?

JournalCon 2004 will be held in DC, practically in my backyard. Eh, well, not my backyard since that's really not a backyard and more of an actual alley, and it's kinda several metro stops or a 30 minute walk away from my backyard/alley, but you sort of get the point. It's, like, really close, man.

JournalCon is a "gathering of online journalers, diarists, personal webloggers and other web writers." Of course, I don't really know what JournalCon is like, having never been in the three years they've been holding it, but it can't be too bad of a way to kill an August weekend.

The birth of robotic mobile photo blogging. As Evan says: Laugh now . . . while you can!

The dullest blog in the world.

I shall refrain from comment.

Link via Doc Searls

Dive into spam:

Weblogging is growing up. Oh wait, you thought that would be a good thing? You must still be young.

Oliver Willis, in Deflating The Blog Bubble, writes:

During one of the Saturday sessions [at BloggerCon] a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as "utopia". Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don't want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities.

A thoughtful and thought-provoking post on the reality, not the hype, of weblogs.

I've been slightly annoyed recently by the minor outbreak of inane comments posted by the intellectually inept who wind their way to some years old post via a search engine. Comments of this nature tend to be more annoying than offensive, and sometimes are just pathetic in their lack of basic reading comprehension.

But more disconcerting is the recent outbreak of comment spam. In the last week, I've deleted at least a half dozen or more advertisements for penis enlargement pills, viagra, and other questionable products that were posted to comments on random blog entries. Seems like I'm not alone either [1, 2, 3, 4, etc.].

I've seen a few methods [1, 2] for stopping this that involve multiple customizations to Movable Type.

For the time being, though, I've finally converted the backend of my Movable Type installation to MySQL* and used this close comments script (which you actually have to get here now) to close comments on all posts older than 21 days. Not only does this decrease the annoying crufty responses, but I hope that it will also limit some of the targets for the vulgar spam.

I'm seriously considering changing my policy of having open comments on every new post. I might just open up comments for the posts that I want people's feedback on. That seems a shame, but I spend enough time filtering spam from my email inboxes. I don't want to have to do the same with my weblog.

* That also explains why the Last Modified date for every post on this weblog is now 5:53pm yesterday. Argh.

Will Richardson writes:

Forget all that stuff I said about moving too fast. I've decided I'm going to create one Web log a day as a surprise "gift" to various clubs and teams and teachers.

Great idea for a school! Eighty percent of them will never get used, but the twenty percent that do will probably use them really well.

John Kruper writes a remarkably well-balanced entry, Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille's heel?, on his weblog, The Electric Lyceum:

The moral of the story? While blogs and other "lightweight" community publishing systems will surely find their way into the motivated educator's hands, their impact will remain limited until they are married to the more mundane (and decidedly not pedagogically-valued) class management features that are the bread and butter of "traditional" course management systems.

The interesting question then becomes, from which end of the spectrum will this post-revolution revolution emerge? Will blogs grow class management wings? Or will commercial course management systems shove blogs inside the courses alongside their documents and folders? Of course, don't count out the possibility that an entirely new species may emerge, one that is natively optimized along both dimensions!

I've always thought that the idea of replacing course management systems with weblogs just illustrated that the person making the suggestion didn't understand the role of course management systems at the institutional level. Kruper hits the nail on the head, though.

FWIW, weblogs won't take on course management functionality because weblog vendors aren't going to be competitive in that vertical (and they know it). Course management system will eventually integrate with existing weblog tools or incorporate blog-like publishing, though.

TypePad, the new hosted weblog service from Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, was launched at 11:59 PM on Monday, August 4.

To quote Matt Haughey for a second time this week:

You know what I call 11:59 PM on August 4th? Tuesday.

Unlike Blogger, the service which TypePad's business model most closely resembles, TypePad isn't free, although with the basic plan starting at $4.95 per month it is relatively cheap. I say relatively, because I only pay $5 per month to ICDsoft, my web hosting provider. ICDsoft doesn't provide me with nifty weblog authoring software, so I had to install Movable Type myself, but for that five bucks I get a heck of a lot more space (333 MB) than TypePad is offering, plus a lot more flexibility.

But I'm a power user. Even more so than Blogger, TypePad is a service aimed at the Aunt Mabels of the world -- the non-technical consumer who doesn't place any importance on a webhost having MySQL and PHP support or whatever. They want a tool that has a good interface and accomplishes the desired task. And they're probably willing to pay the price of a vente mocha frappucino for it each month.

I don't think the competition for TypePad will come from Blogger or Userland. From what I've seen of TypePad, the interface outstrips both of those products. TypePad will eventually have to compete with AOL Journals and whatever weblogging tool MSN eventually releases (oh, c'mon, you know they will). Since the Aunt Mabels are already paying for AOL or MSN, Six Apart will either need to grab those users and make them good customers right now or have a convincing story to differentiate TypePad from the weblog tools that will be rolled into the consumer online services. Just having a better interface may not be enough to dislodge Aunt Mabel.

I've slightly revised the draft for this weblog's editorial policy. I doubt there will be many more changes, but as before, any feedback is appreciated.

Ten Reasons Why Weblog Editorial Policy, Beta Version 0.1

1. VERSION

This is version 0.2 of the Ten Reasons Why Weblog Editorial Policy.

2. SCOPE

This policy applies to all entries from the date of adoption forward. Where possible it will be retroactively applied to entries, but that is not gauranteed. The date of adoption for this version of the Editorial Policy is _____.

3. TIMESTAMPS
1. Timestamps on entries. Entries in this weblog will show two timestamps:
1. "Posted At" date will indicate the time the entry was first published to the weblog.
2. "Last Modifed At" date will indicate the last time entry was edited. If the "Posted At" and "Last Modified At" dates are the same, you will know that the entry has not been modified. If they are different, there has been some change, deletion, or addition.
2. Caveat. Unfortunately, Movable Type defaults the timestamp to the date/time that the entry was written. E.g. if I draft something at 11am and don't post it until 3pm, the timestamp will show 11am instead of 3pm. If I make changes to it between 11am and 3pm, it will display different Posted At and Last Modified At timestamps. Movable Type doesn't appear to record the time of publishing, just time of creation and time of last modification. Since MT won't record this date/time automatically, I will have to remember to update it manually if I'm posting a previously drafted, un-public entry. I've forgotten to do this several times in the past, and I expect that I will forget again in the future. If I fail to remember to update it manually, I will post a correction (per "Changes" below) as soon as it comes to my attention.
4. CHANGES
1. What might be changed without notice. I will make changes without notice to non-substantive components of an entry such as spelling, punctuation, typos, grammar, broken or incorrectly entered URLs, changes of categories, formatting, layout, and page design. Non-substantive components are those which can be changed without semantically affecting the entry.
2. What will not be changed without notice. Anything substantive that semantically affects the tone or meaning of the entry or would result in a factual difference.
3. Process for substantive changes. If I notice incorrect information, if I need to "tone down" my language, or if I say something I regret, I will correct that error either by a new entry with the change that links back to the original entry and/or an addition (see below) to the entry that contains the information being changed.
5. ADDITIONS
1. Additions to entries. Additions to an entry after the time of original publication will be indicated as such, either inline or as an appended paragraph marked as "Update."
6. DELETIONS
1. Deleting entire entries. Entire entries will not be knowingly or intentionally deleted from this weblog.
2. Deleting portions of entries. If it becomes necessary to delete a portion of an entry (e.g. for legal reasons or because I have later decided it is too offensive or incorrect to be allowed to remain in public view), the deleted portion will be replaced with a notice indicating the general nature of what has been deleted and the reason for deletion.
7. COMMENTS
1. The privilege to comment. This is my weblog on my personal web space; posting comments here is a privilege, not a right. Please refrain from outright flames, extreme vulgarity, or comment-spam. You can always comment on my entries on your own weblog.
2. Closing comments. Comments on entries may be closed (e.g. disabling of the ability to add a comment to a post) at any time without notice. You can always comment on my entries on your own weblog.
3. Deleting comments in entirety or in part. Comments may be deleted in entirety or in part without notice. I may do so for legal issues (slander, libel, or intellectual property violations), extreme offensiveness, spam, or duplicate comments. When deleting an entire comment or portion of a comment, I will leave the comment "container" in place with text that indicates the general nature of what has been deleted and the reason for deletion, except in the case of duplication.
4. Modifying comments. Unless it is necessary to delete all or a portion of a comment, I will not modify other's comments on my weblog. Changes or additions to my own comments will follow the same rules as for entries. In general, I will not change comments, but rather add another comment to the discussion thread.

Stephen Downes has written a tutorial on How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer.

Here's a simpler tutorial:

1. Get a weblog tool that supports RSS.
2. Write.
3. Let the weblog tool do the RSS work.

I haven't commented on the RSS/Atom debate (or RSS/Echo or RSS/Pie or RSS/RSS), because the whole thing is sadly personality-laden. However, I have followed it. And one of the most nonsensical tidbits I've seen (and of course can't find a link for at this moment) is the argument that RSS is better because it's "human readable." In other words, someone can look at an RSS file and more or less interpret the XML.

News flash, folks: Humans don't want to read RSS files in their raw form. And they sure as hell don't want write RSS files by hand in Notepad. (Beer? Yeah, they do want that.)

Hats off to Stephen, because I know that there is a subset of humans (e.g. "geeks," a group yours truly is sometimes lumped into, as well) who do nutty things like open RSS feeds to deciper the XML or code the stuff by hand. (And then they have big arguments over it, because how your arch-nemesis forms his XML is a Really Important Thing™. )

I also understand that back in the day (e.g. the 90's) all us old-timers learned to hand-code HTML pages by viewing the source of other people's HTML pages. Great approach!

But you know what? Your Aunt Mabel might publish a weblog with Blogger or Radio, but she's not going to scour the source of HTML pages to figure out a way to hand-code it. Nor is she going to do that with her RSS.

I don't expect Stephen's intended audience was your Aunt Mabel, but to bring this back around to some kind of semi-coherent thought, Aunt Mabel is the reason "human readable" is as ridiculous as the 1980's notion that every high school student should take a semester of Computer Science where they learn to program in Basic on an Apple IIe or else "they won't be able to use computers."

The best standards or specifications -- and probably the best technologies, in general -- are invisible; they should strive to not need to make themselves known to users.

Users should never have to think about how RSS or Atom feeds are formed, or even the difference between RSS and Atom. They should click a "syndicate my content" button in their publishing tool and a "fetch content from this source" tool in their aggregator and it should work, whatever the common formats are. If Aunt Mabel even has to remotely think about reading or writing an RSS file in its raw XML form, then the software developers have failed miserably.

the Technorati Top 100 looks significantly different than it did a few weeks ago. Although apparently it's sort of old news, I missed that Technorati, the nifty service that lets you know which weblogs link to which other weblogs, started including LiveJournal users in its mix.

What's amazing is the order of magnitude by which the hyperlinking between LiveJournal users totally outstrips the "mainstream" webloggers. Even mighty contenders like Slashdot, Boing Boing, and Instapundit are knocked from the top spots.

LiveJournal has a reputation of being populated by geeky teenage gamers, but they've clearly built a social network that's as, if not more, robust than the non-LiveJournal blogosphere.

Prediction: this is just a shadow of what we'll see when AOL Journals start to get traction.

I've watched the recent controversy over depublishing with great interest. I've participated, far more vigorously than I normally do, in discussion threads on several (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) weblogs over this issue.

Someone asked me why this was so important to me. Although my paycheck isn't explicitly because of my writing skills these days, at times in the past 15 years I've been paid for writing or editing newspaper articles, magazine features, fiction, public relations materials, advertising copy, technical manuals, etc., as well as having taught writing at several universities. I consider myself a writer. I consider writing an important activity that has the potential for immense impact. Someone who engages in writing, particularly someone whose words reach a wide audience, should hold themselves accountable for what he or she writes. If not, I believe it is justifiable for her community to hold her accountable for their writing practice. In the end, isn't that one of the roles of society -- to hold accountable those individuals who refuse to hold themselves accountable?

With my own accountability in mind, I have put together a first version of an editorial policy for this weblog. Comments and feedback on this draft of the editorial policy are welcome.

Ten Reasons Why Weblog Editorial Policy, Beta Version 0.1

1. VERSION

This is version 0.1 of the Ten Reasons Why Weblog Editorial Policy.

2. SCOPE

This policy applies to all posts from the date of adoption forward. Where possible it will be retroactively applied to posts, but that is not gauranteed. The date of adoption for this version of the Editorial Policy is _____.

3. TIMESTAMPS
1. Timestamps on entries. Entries in this weblog will show two timestamps:
1. "Posted At" date will indicate the time the entry was first published to the weblog.
2. "Last Modifed At" date will indicate the last time the post was edited. If the "Posted At" and "Last Modified At" dates are the same, you will know that the post has not been modified. If they are different, there has been some change, deletion, or addition.
2. Caveat. Unfortunately, Movable Type defaults the timestamp to the date/time that the post was written. E.g. if I draft something at 11am and don't post it until 3pm, the timestamp will show 11am instead of 3pm. Movable Type doesn't appear to record the time of publishing, just time of creation and time of last modification. Since MT won't record this date/time automatically, I will have to remember to update it manually if I'm posting a previously drafted, un-public entry. I've forgotten to do this several times in the past, and I expect that I will forget again in the future. If I fail to remember to update it manually, I will post a correction (per "Changes" below) as soon as it comes to my attention.
4. CHANGES
1. What might be changed without notice: spelling, punctuation, typos, grammar, incorrectly entered URLs, and other non-substantive material like formatting, layout, and page design. Non-substantive material is that which can be changed without semantically affecting the entry.
2. What will not be changed without notice: Anything substantive that semantically affects the tone or meaning of the entry or would result in a factual difference.
3. Process for changes.
If I notice incorrect information, if I need to "tone down" my language, or if I say something I regret, I will correct that error either by a new post with the change that links back to the original post and/or an addition (see below) to the post that contains the information being changed.
5. ADDITIONS
1. Additions to entries. Additions to an entry after the time of original publication will be indicated as such, either inline or as an appended paragraph marked as "Update."
6. DELETIONS
1. Deleting entire entries. Entire entries will not be knowingly or intentionally deleted from this weblog.
2. Deleting portions of entries If it becomes necessary to delete a portion of an entry (e.g. for legal reasons or because I have later decided it is too offensive or incorrect to be allowed to remain in public view), the deleted portion will be replaced with a notice indicating the general nature of what has been deleted and the reason for deletion.
7. COMMENTS
1. Who "owns" the comments? This is my weblog on my personal web space. Any comments posted here are hosted on my website, ergo I reserve the right to delete comments or portions of comments if necessary. You can always comment on my posts on your own weblog.
2. Modifying comments. Unless it is necessary to delete all or a portion of a comment, I will not modify other's comments on my weblog. Changes or additions to my own comments will follow the same rules as for entries. In general, I will not change comments, but rather add another comment to the discussion thread.

3. Deleting comments in entirety or in part. Generally speaking, I don't feel it is often necessary to delete comments. The only reasons to delete comments would be legal issues (slander, libel, or intellectual property violations), extreme offensiveness, or duplication. When deleting an entire comment or portion of a comment, I will leave the comment "container" in place with text that indicates the general nature of what has been deleted and the reason for deletion.

Rebecca Blood: Weblog Ethics, excerpted from her book The Weblog Handbook.

A summary:

1. Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.
2. If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
3. Publicly correct any misinformation.
4. Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
5. Disclose any conflict of interest.
6. Note questionable and biased sources.

Bravo! Number four is particularly pertinent to the recent brouhaha. Number six as well. ;-)

Overnight, I thought about the post I made yesterday regarding de-publishing. I'm working up an editorial policy to make it clear to my readers (both of you!) what is subject to change, what is not, and to be able to represent that changes have take place through representation of posted vs. modified dates.

One of the few frustrations I have with Movable Type is that MTEntryDate is always the date of the creation of the entry (e.g. when you clicked on "New Entry") and not the posting date. I frequently create a post and use Movable Type's draft mode to save it while I work on it. Sometimes, I might not post it for a day or two. If I don't remember to manually change the entry date, I wind up "posting to the past" because the date defaults to date of creation, not date of posting.

What I would like is, for each entry, to be able to automatically indicate the time and date of creation, the time and date of posting, and the time and date of the last update.

The LastModified MT plug-in gets me that last part. I haven't been able to find the appropriate combination of MT tags or plug-ins that will allow me to automatically distinguish the "created on" date from the time of posting.

Thoughts? Solutions?

Mark Pilgrim has instituted an interesting site, called Winer Watcher. It uses Dave Winer's RSS feed to track the frequent changes, additions, and deletions Winer makes to his Scripting News weblog. I noticed this recently, because there's a particularly inflammatory post about Tim Bray in my Scripting News RSS feed that has been edited out of existence on the actual weblog.

Of course, this is nothing new. I've been irked with Winer's "editorial policy" (or lack thereof) before and wrote extensively about it's failures in this thread in Paolo Valdemarin's weblog. The short version is: I believe ethics and accountability demand that if you make substantive changes or corrections to published comments, that those changes and corrections be publicly acknowledged.

Winer's standard disclaimer is that he "edits in public" and his "publication time is 10pm." I think that's a cop out. On a weblog, when something is posted, it is public. Ergo, the time of posting is the time of publication; the words are present, distributed, and have impact. Winer frequently writes inflammatory posts, then removes the inflammatory parts or deletes the entire post. He attempts to make it appear as if the inflammatory words never existed. This isn't editing; this is de-publishing. (In earlier posts I refered to this as "un-publishing," but I'll use "de-publishing" now. The term "unpublished" has the existing meaning of "not yet published".)

De-publishing is a mechanism only available to online writers who control their own publication medium (e.g. bloggers). In print, radio, or TV, once you've made your content public, you can't pull it back. Yesterday's print edition of the Washington Post is out there; no way to de-publish it.

Even online, you can only de-publish your words, if you (the author) are also the publisher. E.g. a reporter for a newspaper that publishes articles online probably can't pull their words offline without going through the editorial process. An editor is supposed to be a check against failure of journalist ethics (although from the recent New York Times debacle, we know that's not a perfect system). Only an online author that is also their own online publisher can de-publish.

As Mark has made evident, though, RSS feeds frequently leave a virtual paper trail of the changes.So, bravo to Mark Pilgrim for exposing this practice for what it is. I only wish Mark had been doing it longer, so we had a more complete archive of Winer's de-published comments.

Shelley Powers comments on AOL's plan to launch a weblogging tool:

I remember AOL and Usenet and all those naive users dumped on to the Usenet groups, coming close to all but destroying some of them. Now we have potentially the same thing happening to weblogging and all people can see is marketing and business, new social software vistas, and, more importantly -- more people weblogging.

The Internet belongs to AOL subscribers, too.

Off to the SuperNova Conference Blogger Party, digital camera in hand (well, more like "in pocket," but you get the drift).

Pray that it doesn't rain again, because I have no umbrella with me today.

Dave Sifry has written a web service for pinging Technorati to let it know you've updated your weblog.

Technorati, of course, is a useful service that lets you know what weblogs have linked to each other, as well as other nifty functionality like hottest links in the blogosphere. For example, here is a list of weblogs referring to us here at 10RW. (FYI, that was the "royal us.")

Of course, right now Technorati says this weblog was last updated 8 hours and 15 minutes ago, because it doesn't get scanned on posting, but on some other timeframe. Now with the pinger, Technorati can be notified at the time I make a post. Yay!

Microdoc News: The Emerging Sixth Estate

So I'm watching the conversation go by in the #joiito IRC channel, and Robert Ivanc (Clarity3650) is chatting on IRC from his mobile phone while in a movie theater, waiting for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle to start. Except when the movie starts, he not only continues to chat but is sending still photos of the moview screen from his phone to his mobile blog.

Mind-boggling!

The weblog world always wondered when the sleeping giants would wake up and take notice. Well, at least one giant has awakened: AOL is rolling out weblogs. Jeff Jarvis writes about "AOL Journals" in BuzzMachine. Jarvis was one of a few A-List bloggers invited to preview AOL Journals (others were Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, Nick Denton, and Clay Shirky. Highlighted features of the "AOL Journals" include blogging from AIM and support for RSS 2.0. The general consensus: "It doesn't suck."

Both Jarvis and Shirky (writing about AOL Journals in Corante's Many-to-many social software weblog) make note of the challenge that faces AOL: will AOL Journals be a community tool (a la LiveJournal) or a lightweight publishing tool (a la Movable Type). Shirky has a spot-on analysis of this in his post. He says, in part:

Community conversation vs Lightweight publishing platform is not a zero-sum set of choices, but there is a spectrum of offerings, from LiveJournal's hyper-sociability, to Blogger, which still doesn't support comments, and the choice of features has a significant effect on patterns of use.

If that turns out to be the case, I expect AOL Journals to have little significant impact on the world of weblogs that I imagine you and I participate in, dear reader. I mean, how many LiveJournal sites do you read regularly?

Update at 9:27am: Oh, and one more thing -- how long now before MSN incorporates a weblog tool? :-)

This is a test of the Zempt blog client for Movable Type. The client runs on your local machine and posts directly to MT (I hope -- this post is the test of it).

The dandy thing about it for me is that because (a) I use Mozilla and (b) no one has implemented the Mozilla Midas specification for rich-text editing in MT (yet), Zempt gives me a WYSIWYG editing environment in which to write (and edit?) MT posts.

Here goes.. . . we're trying to post.

Update: Hey, whaddayaknow! It worked!. And it's gonna make my XHTML a lot more valid, probably.

Yay! Back in May, I suggested to Joi Ito that he organize a blogger party around the Supernova Conference here in Washington.

Looks like he thought it was a good idea: Blogger Party in DC!!

The Daring Fireball weblog complains about TrackBack:

"[T]here are ways to track links that are much simpler than TrackBack. Referrers, for one. When you follow a link from one web page to another, your browser includes referrer information in the HTTP headers of the request. The referrer should be the URL of the page from which you came; if you click on any of the links in this article, for example, the web site you’re heading to will get a referrer from this page at daringfireball.net. " [link via Scripting News]

TrackBack of course, is the notification technology created by Six Apart. Daring Fireball has created his own referrers script that list referring websites. In doing so he illustrates the fault of his logic.

Although even Six Apart defines it as such, TrackBack is not really "designed to provide a method of notification between websites." It is has been designed to provides a method of notification between weblog posts. And a "site" is not a "post."

Look at the list of referrers at the bottom of John's post . Note that the top referrers this morning are:

blogdex.media.mit.edu/
www.scripting.com/
www.kottke.org/
www.dashes.com/anil/
kottke.org/
scripting.com/

Ignore for a moment the inefficiency of all the duplicates. Briefly note the fact that the referrers link to the home page of the weblog (which is where the post is today), instead of to the permalink for the individual post that references the Daring Fireball site. TrackBack would have taken you to the post itself.

Now ruminate for a little longer on where these referrers will lead you in a week or two. If you go to each of those sites, you'll find a link on their page today to the Daring Fireball article. In a week or two, the referrer will still point to the top page of Scripting.com or Kottke.org, but the weblog post referencing the Daring Fireball site will have rotated off the front page. At that point the referrer link is useless -- it doesn't get you to the information you're looking for, the comment on the Daring Fireball post.

Weblogs are not websites. Weblogs are defined as "a collection of discrete, dated entries that are organized sequentially in time and published to the World Wide Web." Referrers are page to page tracking, but cannot take into account the discrete structural elements -- posts -- on a given page.

TrackBack solves a specific need of weblogs that referrers cannot: post to post referral.

Ah, looks like Stephen Downes is getting on board with my loathing of the "everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything" hype. ;-) Stephen's dead-on right: the "Online Learning 2003 Weblogue" is just a discussion board masquerading as a weblog...and it's not even a good costume!

As Stephen points in his post, attempts to define "weblog" continue to bounce around, so it's high time someone put a stop to that with the definitive definition (is that redundant?).

That time is now, and that person is me. :-)

UPDATE (06/05/03, 5:20pm): Bitten by draft mode in MT again. Hit Publish by accident. When I switched it back to Draft, it was removed from the index page, but not the archives or RSS feed. Sigh. Seems you have to rebuild those to make that Publish/Draft change happen everyplace. Oh well. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, imagine my surprise when Stephen Downes picked up on this post. I had some changes I wanted to make to it, so I will add those as an addendum at the bottom of the post. However, since it already squeaked out of the cage, there's no option but to let it loose.

Fly, little post! Be free!

I think Dave Winer's recent essay on what makes a weblog a weblog misses the mark. Dave both throws his net too broadly, calling "the personalities of the writers com[ing] through" the "essential element" of weblog, and throws the net too narrowly, listing all the possible features of weblog software.

Even more off the mark is the Russ Lipton definition Winer pointed to recently: a weblog is just a web site organized by time. By that definition, the Washington Post website is a weblog.

As far as I'm concerned, the closed definition around (until mine, which is coming in a few paragraphs, I promise!) is from Meg Hourihan in her Raymond Carver-ishly titled O'ReillyNet article, What We're Doing When We Blog. (Of course, I one-upped her on the Carverishness.) Hourihan hits it dead on when she writes, "If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share -- the format."

A weblog is a rhetorical form, as is a a short story or a business letter or newspaper article or, perhaps most pertinently, a diary. The key to defining a weblog is noting what the common components of the form are. Thankfully we have a ready model.

Although many balk at the personal nature of the comparison, a weblog compares to nothing so well as a diary or journal or (duh) a log. All are characterized by discrete, dated entries that are organized sequentially.

A weblog differs from a diary or journal in only one significant way: the medium in which it is delivered. A log written in a paper notebook can never be a weblog; it must be on the web.

So here it is, my very own definition of weblogs (and a damn good one, I think):

A weblog is a collection of discrete, dated* entries that are organized sequentially in time and published to the World Wide Web.

*See the Addendum below for why this is in blue.

The medium of the web generates three other significant ramifications, however I don't believe any of these are defining characteristics. These other components are

• Hypertext links. Certainly this is impossible in a paper journal, but I would argue that linking is not a requirement of the form. Certainly, the web encourages linking -- that's what it's designed to do -- and a weblog without linkage is less likely to be read, but it remains true that you can publish a collection of discrete, dated entries to the web and not link to anything else.

  Users of Blogger, Userland, and Six Apart blogging tools seem less likely to take this approach, but many services like LiveJournal, Diaryland, Xanga, Pitas, et al cater to this approach (and their users may, in fact, outnumber the Blogger, Radio, and Movable Type webloggers).

• Multiple authors. This isn't impossible on paper (literally and metaphorically), however it is impractical. Publishing to the web greatly enables collaborative journalling.
• Comments. Again, something that is possible when keeping a log in a notebook, but is usually never done because of the impracticality of it.

In fact, I could probably reel off several other features of weblogs that are enabled by the web (e.g. search, archives, categories, Last Year On This Date, etc.), but that sort of leads me to the next point: features of weblog software don't define weblogs.

Winer's definition, and to a certain extent Hourihan's as well, get bogged down in defining, or at least describing, weblogs by the features of weblog software. When you look at weblogs as a rhetorical form, the bells and whistles are unimportant. You're looking for the formal components, without which one simply could not conceive of the product being a "weblog."

Here then is a brief list of things that do not define weblogs: titles, time stamps, permalinks, archives, categories, calendars, RSS feeds, Trackback, pings, etc. etc. (basically the last 3/4 of Winer's essay). Those are features of the tools we use to write weblogs, and they add to our experience of weblogs and to the usefulness of weblogs, but they are not requirements of the form. Think about it: would a diary cease to be a diary if it was written in pen instead of pencil, or the entries were not titled?

ADDENDUM: (06/05/03, 5:20pm) I had intended to not publish this post yet because I had some changes I wanted to make to it. But my misstep yesterday (see above) sent it out over RSS.

So here are some thoughts I had last evening after I drafted this:

1. I flipped back and forth over including "dated" in the definition (as in "a collection of dated, discrete" entries). In retrospect, I think it belongs in there. I can't imagine any journal or log that doesn't include dates. The temporal nature of the entry is key to placing it in a context, so I think the date is crucial to the form.

2. Russ Lipton's definition is closer to the mark than I originally gave him credit for. As I wrote this I came to realize that "organization by time" is a crucial component of the weblog form -- it can't be a weblog without organization by time (hence the "dated" comments above). So he's about 1/3 the way there. However, even more crucial are the concepts of discrete entries and, more to the point, organization of those entries sequentially in time. E.g. a newspaper's website is organized by time and the entries are discrete, however they are not sequential -- article #1 in the Post doesn't "come before" article #1. In fact, newspapers are designed to be read non-sequentially.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article titled Scholars Who Blog:

Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?

[link via Gallowglass]

Great lead. :-) But the story seems to focus on wannabe talking heads, the *pundits of the world, those scholarly few who salivate at the idea of being a guest commentator for CNN or FoxNews. Nary a mention of using weblogs for actual teaching and learning.

Wow! I've been busy and missed a lot of activity over this discussion in the last couple of days. I wish I had time to respond in depth to all the good thoughts, but I don't. So linkage and an exhortation to Go read these! will have to suffice.

UPDATE (05/29/03: 10:05AM): Corrected one of the attributions, based on Joe Luft's comment to this post.

UPDATE (05/29/03, 10:20AM): for those of you coming from Online Learning Daily (thanks, Stephen), the list has been expanded to include the earlier posts in the conversation and is in roughly chronological order.

Will Richardson (who started all this!): Legal Issues of Student Publishing
Greg Ritter: Student Publishing and Privacy
Greg Ritter: Student Publishing and Privacy, Take Two
James Farmer: Student Publishing
James Farmer: More on Student Weblogging
Tom Hoffman Joe Luft: Publishing and Privacy
Ann Davis: Writing to Learn (Ann, I've seen this same reaction in college students, so it's not limited to elementary school age!)
Tim Lauer: Student Publishing and Privacy
Tom Hoffman: Class Weblogs and Privacy
Will Richardson: Student Publishing Cont.

Trying to collect this list makes me realize that we still lack a good technology for tracking cross-blog discussions.

The buttons have gotten out of control. Thanks, man.

Steal my buttons:

It seems like Bonnie B. is implying that my dissatisfaction with the "everything's a weblog and weblogs are everything" mentality means I want people to spend big money on enterprise software. Maybe she didn't read my follow-up or the comments to that follow-up where I pointed Lindon at dozens of open source options, as well as the commercial ones?

Anyway, Bonnie asks "Why administer a half-dozen different systems if you can offer the same functionality with a single system?" Ah, but that's a misleading question. It presumes the "same functionality" exists, and that ability to achieve the "same functionality" is precisely what I'm questioning.

When you shoehorn a technology into a purpose for which it wasn't designed (e.g., driving a nail with a saw), you may eventually reach the same goal, but you're not getting the same functionality. I might eventually drive the nail into a board with a saw, but my experience would be much improved by using the right tool. The price for the difference in functionality is often paid in frustration and lack of effectiveness.

Bonnie recognizes this in the next paragraph, complaining about the situations where institutions are "trying to use [the product] for lots of things it's not very good at." Of course, Bonnie's complaint is the same argument I made to James about his vision for a weblogs -- he was talking about using them for things they're not very good at. In fact, I began using the "don't drive a nail with a saw" adage several yearsa go while providing training for my company's commercial solution, precisely to discourage customers from "trying to use it for lots of things it's not very good at."

When introducing a new technology like weblogs to users -- particularly to educators inexperienced with using technology in their teaching practice -- I've had the most success by introducing the technology in the context for which it was designed. Inflating the value of the technology -- trying to shoehorn it into functionality for which it wasn't designed -- while you introduce it is a recipe for disaster. In my experience, the users' frustration level goes up, effectiveness goes down, and they turn away from the tool quickly.

This is true regardless of the whether you're talking free or commerical tools or about tools with general or narrow purposes. It's not about price or purpose; it's about application. When you misapply a technology, the users' frustration and resignation occurs whether the institution has spent six figures on the software or downloaded an open source app for free. There's a point when attempting to "get the most bang for your buck" (by hammering those nails with the saw you already have) ceases to provide a return on your investment and becomes an obstacle in and of itself.

[NOTE: the timestamp on this post was changed on this to reflect post time, as opposed to draft time. I really dislike that MT defaults to initial draft as the timestamp. :-/ ]

James Farmer makes some good comments in my previous post on Student Publishing and Privacy. In particular he says, "Were you more mortified cos of possible legal consequences or the pressure on students? I don't quite get your main concern."

I'm all for using weblogs in education, particularly in the writing classroom or (probably more importantly) as a way to bring writing to non-writing classrooms. And there are many disciplines where assignments require public "performance" -- dance, music, theater, journalism (writing for the school newspaper), etc. So no reason we can't make writing a public performance as well -- that's a terrific idea because it can really change the concept of audience for the emerging writer.

However . . .

I believe teachers may be on shaky ground if we make evaluation of the student's writing part of the public performance, which is what I saw Will doing with his students.

There are a few concerns here:

1. The legal concerns. FERPA prevents distribution of a minor student's "educational record" without parental consent. What defines an "educational record" isn't clear, but in my experience most districts interpret it liberally to err on the side of caution.

Posting to weblogs might be considered public performance and parents usually don't accuse districts of FERPA violations because the star student in the school play was listed in the program. Of course, that program with the student's name isn't distributed world-wide either. :-/

However, once you start posting evaluations of student work (by teachers or peers, like Will did) to a publicly available weblog, I think that districts would be right to worry about the legality of making evaluation of assignments public.

With kids under 13 you might run into COPPA violations as well. Again, parental consent is the key.

2. The ethical concerns. Legal issues aside, I find exposing a evaluation of a student's work -- even informal evaluation such as peer reviews -- to the entire world to be problematic. Even if feedback on writing assignments is provided constructively, it can be apparent which students have excelled and which are having trouble. Students who receive poor evaluations, or even feedback that makes it apparent their writing skills are not strong, may suffer more and feel shame if those evaluations are posted for anyone in the world to see.

3. The pedagogical perspective. As a writing instructor, one of the hardest things to overcome is the lack of confidence the vast majority of learners feel about their writing skill. In my classes, I always endeavored to provide a "safe" environment in which the students can explore their writing skills. Part of creating that sense of safety is the understanding that "drafts don't count." No one but your teacher and your peer review group sees them. Assuming the peer review group and teacher can provide constructive feedback, this idea of a low-risk draft should ideally provide the student with the freedom to experiment more. Making the drafts available online for the world to see works against the idea of a low-risk environment; some students may feel additional pressure to perform in the draft phase of the writing process because that's being made public. And they shouldn't -- drafts shouldn't "count." But making the draft phase -- and particularly the evaluation of those early phases -- available to the world may make them "count" more for students who are already intimidated by writing.

Dave Winer implemented a weblog search using the Google API. He seems really thrilled by it.

'Cept it's been done. Speaking of prior art, a Google API-based weblog search tool has already been built by Micah Alpern. The results return isn't nearly as nifty as Dave's, but Micah's does integrate with your blogroll to add a "Search Blogs I Read" feature. That is nifty.

However, both Dave's and Micah's tools have a fatal flaw: Google.

According to Google's cache, the last time Google crawled Scripting News was May 16. (Also the last date it crawled 10RW.) If you do a search today for"weblog search" on Dave's site, the results are incomplete. Google hasn't yet crawled anything he's written recently.

Movable Type, on the other hand, has a search tool already built in. (See the little search box over on the side?) I don't know what Ben and Mena are using to power it, but whatever it is, it indexes every word of my weblog immediately. It's probably extremely low overhead, as it doesn't have to "crawl" -- it can just index each post as you post it.

I can even search for "the" and get every post back. (Well, I assume every post; I didn't check to see if there are posts where I didn't use "the.")

Like Dave's tool, Movable Type's search presents the results reverse-chronologically. Instead of providing the whole web log post (which could be overkill and wasted resources, unless you're as pithy and brief as Dave), it excerpts the post and provides a link to the full post. If you're logged in to Movable Type, it also provides an Edit link that kicks you right into the editing form. Ooh, did I mention you can also use regular expressions?

Most importantly, I don't have to wait for Google to crawl my weblog. The Movable Type weblog search will return hits on the stuff I blogged minutes ago. As Dave would say, Bing! That's killer.

It seems to me like Google is overkill for a weblog search. Google's great because it scales for humongobytes (one humongobyte = a gazillion terabytes) of information. But for the amount of content in an individual weblog, you don't need the scalability of Google. What you do want (at least I want) the freshness of having everything indexed as soon as it's posted.

Blogger has this functionality, but only on the authoring side. E.g. from the authoring side you can search all your posts. They don't expose it to the users like MT does. They should.

Why don't Manilla and Radio already have the kind of search capability MT has? Or do they? Or am I missing the sparkliness of Dave's tool?

Bottom line: using Google to search your own weblogs, you're sacrificing freshness for scalability that you don't need. And freshness is what makes weblogs tasty. [Homer Simpson voice] Mmmmm. Weblogs.

Microdoc Reviews: 2003/03/11:

"FM Radio Station brings into one application a News Aggregator, Publishing Tool and Browser. For the first time since beginning with Radio, I can safely leave a partially finished blog and go see a news item, or surf to a site in the browser without the fear of losing my partly completed log. This is one of the best feelings I have had since beginning to use FMRS."

Finally! A tool for the user who doesn't know how to open another friggin' browser window. Thank goodness you can now pay $39.95 to avoid learning how to use ALT-TAB!

Amazing. If I'd had a laptop with wifi this morning I might have blogged from the coffee shop that I was thinking about privacy issues related to Will Richardson's post last week of the online peer review his students are conducting in public on weblogs. But, no wifi, so you'll just have to take my word that I was ruminating on this over latte an hour ago.

So what's in my news aggregator this morning? Will ruminating over legal issues of student publishing!

I'm glad he's thinking about it. Frankly, as a former writing instructor, I was mortified to see the student's peer reviews publicly available. First, from a writing pedagogy perspective, I think you risk significantly increasing the pressure on the students, many of whom are already intimidated by sharing their work with a small group. Second, I would be concerned that it is treading dangerously close to a FERPA violation, since this is making a students work and, more importantly, the teacher's evaluation of their work publicly availably. Thin ice!

Absolutely nothing! Say it again!

James Farmer responds to my previous comments about weblog hype:

"[T]he reason I'm interested in Weblogs as VLEs actually comes out of a frustration with other tools and a weblog is a KM tool already, no? Also, and I'm probably quoting out of cotext here... 'every professor wants to be (and, granted, sometimes has to be) the duke of their own little fiefdom.' So... cool! In educational terms ego's as important as it is anywhere else, isn't that what weblogs are good for. OK, you get lots of reinventing the wheel going on... but that's the same as everywhere else.

A weblog is a personal publishing tool, not a knowledge management tool. And, as D'Arcy Norman pointed out last week, knowledge management is "unpossible" anyway.

By definition, re-invention isn't innovation. Instead, it's usually wasted energy. That re-invention happens frequently doesn't make it valuable.

I certainly don't object to people cobbling their own solutions, particularly if they feel that existing solutions don't meet their needs . . . or can't be made to meet their own needs. However, I believe there are many existing commercial or open source solutions that are designed to meet (or could be used to meet) any of the needs people are attempting to force weblogs into solving.

Over the last several months, I consistently see people attempting to use weblogs to solve problems that have already been solved by other means or attributing wondrous innovation to weblogs that, had they researched the landscape a bit more, they would have found are neither that wondrous nor that innovative.

As a former professor of rhetoric and composition, and someone committed to the value of writing across the curriculum, I see tremendous educational potential for weblogs. I've always believed that writing is one of the best paths to learning. I think some of the faux innovation is coming from people, particularly technologists, who never thought of using writing in their classes starting to see the potential. And, of course, that's only a Good Thing™.

However, I believe the urge to turn personal publishing systems -- weblogs -- into something they're not inflates the value of the technology and damages its credibility. I would rather see people focusing on the ways personal publishing makes a real difference in pedagogy rather than trying to use weblogs as a platform to re-invent every tool, but the kitchen sink . . . particularly since weblogs are a pretty lousy platform for doing that.

This morning, I finally got around to importing all my old posts from my last two Blogger-powered weblogs, the original Ten Reasons Why and good ol' Monkey-Mind.

You'll notice a bunch of new monthly links in the Archives area to your right (and a new "Uncategorized" category with 389 entries). They don't work yet, because I haven't rebuilt the MT archives. I'm hoping this isn't going to generate an RSS feed tomorrow with 389 new posts. Yikes!

All the internal links to other posts in those imported entries are going to be screwed, of course. Any recommendations on dealing with that are welcome. In retrospect, it probably would have been easier to deal with it prior to import, perhaps. Dunno.

Looking through some of those older posts, I realized how much more personal my weblog was when I first started. Nor did I realize I took almost all of 2001 off from blogging!

UPDATE 4:54 PM: Just got around to rebuilding the site, so all the archives should work now.

David Carraher suggests ways shortcomings of education could be addressed through weblogging technologies.

Oops. Unintentionally posted the draft of this post before I finished writing. (Hence the first comment -- no, it wasn't a test. Edit notice: I have now deleted the first half-sentence of my comments to avoid further confusion.

Maybe I'll get around to commenting in detail on Carraher's post later, but here's the short version: Another example (grrrr) of the frustrating "Everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything" mentality!! The benefits Carraher talks about in his first po